Sophie Gee

So I think we have to think of this as the age of big Austen.

in which two or three families in a nice country village have been transformed into a global rom-com industry.

Yeah, and these really are fantastic, fabulous books.

All of them just have so much going on and they're true page turners.

Okay, so let's back it up.

Let's start by reminding ourselves that the novel, by the time Jane Austen was writing, was about 100 years old, almost exactly.

Sense and Sensibility was published in 1813, and people normally think of the first novel in English as being Robinson Crusoe, which was published in 1719.

So Robinson Crusoe is, of course, the tale of heroic male survival on a desert island with just one other companion.

Yeah, but so much was going on in this early story of the novel that has been, by mainstream readers, largely overlooked.

So Austen is building from the tales of escape, rebellion, avoiding seducers and gaslighters, stories of female power and authority, which really proliferate

from the end of the 17th century before Robinson Crusoe, and they peak in the decades of the 1790s and the 1800s, immediately before Austen published her work and when she was writing.

So why is this the case?

I'm going to give you the titles of some of the really early, incredibly successful novels written by these socially extremely daring, quite taboo women who were whipping out their quills and dashing off these early titles.

fictional realist masterpieces.

But why was it happening at this time, at the beginning of the 18th century?

There are lots of theories about where the novel came from, the most popular of which, and I think probably the most correct, are that it saw the rise of a big middle class.

That middle class included a lot of female readers, a

ever more women who were able to read and who had the leisure time to do so.

And they wanted to read about themselves.

They wanted to read about their own experiences.